{"id":4015,"date":"2014-06-11T20:08:29","date_gmt":"2014-06-12T00:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=4015"},"modified":"2016-09-12T20:17:05","modified_gmt":"2016-09-13T00:17:05","slug":"it%e2%80%99s-always-darkest-before-it-turns-pitch-black","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2014\/06\/11\/it%e2%80%99s-always-darkest-before-it-turns-pitch-black\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Always Darkest Before It Turns Pitch Black"},"content":{"rendered":"

My wife\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book club had read Herman Koch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Dinner <\/em>when it came out in 2013, so when she saw me headed into the living room with her copy of it a while back, she predicted that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d read through it in a single sitting—and she wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that far off. (About halfway through, I had to get a glass of water.) For those of you not familiar with the novel, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s essentially a monologue by Paul Lohman, a retired Dutch schoolteacher who, as the story begins, is out with his wife, on their way to a trendy restaurant where they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll meet Paul\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s older brother, Serge, and his wife, to discuss a situation that affects not only their respective children but Serge\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s political aspirations.<\/p>\n

Now, Paul is an extremely cagey narrator, and the story unfolds in a series of micro-revelations, so—after a few chapters—I went back to my wife, and I asked her, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153This video, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to turn out to be [redacted], right?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Oh, no, she assured me, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s much worse than that. Much, much worse, it would turn out.<\/p>\n

And, sure, some of the power of The Dinner<\/em> lies in the shocking incident at the heart of the story, but only some. The greater strength of the novel is in Paul\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s personality and the way it shifts from the time he and his wife leave for the restaurant to the time he returns home. In the beginning, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re drawn in by his narration; he may be a bit closed off emotionally, but he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s smart and engaging, perhaps especially in his annoyances at the little pretensions of those around him. We may be able to identify with those frustrations, and consequently find ourselves warming up to him, taking his side against Serge\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s before the evening has really begun.<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s safe to say you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll come to feel very differently about Paul by the end. As a narrator, Paul reminded me a great deal of Lou Ford, the protagonist of Jim Thompson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s noir classic The Killer Inside Me<\/em>. I was reading The Dinner<\/em> in preparation for an interview with Herman Koch, part of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Word for Word\u00e2\u20ac\u009d series at Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan, so when we met before the event, I brought this up. (I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to spring it on him in front of an audience and then find out maybe he wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t familiar with Thompson, after all.) As it turned out, he hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t read that novel, but (after The Dinner was written), he had looked up another of Thompson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s books, Pop. 1280<\/em>, and he could see where people would find the common ground.
\n
\nDuring the live interview, though, as we started talking about his latest novel, Summer House with Swimming Pool<\/em>, we pivoted from Jim Thompson to Patricia Highsmith and The Talented Mr. Ripley<\/em>, and that, I think, turned out to be an even better reference point, especially where the new book is concerned. Paul Lohman, for all the darkness of his personality, has a narrow field of influence; his decisions affect himself and his immediate family. Marc Schlosser, the narrator of Summer House<\/em>, is a doctor—and as such, he holds the power of life and death over his patients. What, then, would compel him to abuse that power\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 or, as he would frame the issue, to use that power judiciously even if most others would fail to see it that way?<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not giving away much with that question. We learn the broadest strokes of what happens in the opening chapters; one of Marc\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s patients, a prominent Dutch actor named Ralph Meier, has died, and Marc has been implicated in the death. The bulk of the novel is Marc\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s explanation of why it happened, which requires an obsessive detailing of how he manipulates events to put his family in the same resort town as the Meiers. Disgusted at Ralph\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lechery towards his wife, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also making plans to seduce Ralph\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wife, perhaps for no other reason than to prove that he can. His schemes, however, leave his family exposed, and soon the primal urge that drives Marc\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s thoughts is no longer lust but revenge.<\/p>\n

The Dinner<\/em> was a big hit with readers in 2013, especially after a plug from Gillian Flynn, whose Gone Girl<\/em> was frequently invoked for a similar subversion of readers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 expectations. Summer House<\/em> mines the same territory as Koch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s previous novel, but with much less restraint. It took time for us to realize that Paul Lohman was a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153monster,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or a highly focused and strong-willed individual if you prefer. Dr. Schlosser isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a cartoonish villain, but he also doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bother hiding his sense of superiority or his disgust with the world. From the opening pages, we know what he is, and though we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re very unlikely to sympathize with him, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s still possible that we might find ourselves fascinated by his relentless effort to execute his dark vision, adjusting for every obstacle thrown in his path and every personal setback. Fascinated\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 or repulsed\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 or an uncomfortable combination of the two.<\/p>\n

(NOTE: This post originally appeared on Beacon<\/b>.)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My wife\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book club had read Herman Koch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Dinner when it came out in 2013, so when she saw me headed into the living room with her copy of it a while back, she predicted that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d read through it in a single sitting—and she wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that far off. (About halfway through, I had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[965],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4015"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4015"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4017,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4015\/revisions\/4017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}